


Young and Hopeless

by xslytherclawx



Series: Cat Café Universe [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 12:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11578395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xslytherclawx/pseuds/xslytherclawx
Summary: How Yuri's mother met his father, and how she ended up abandoning her son.





	Young and Hopeless

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the names: Russian uses about a million diminutives for every name. Sveta is to Svetlana as Yura is to Yuri (like in English, calling someone named Katherine "Katie"). Svetlanka and Svetushka are more intimate diminutives.  
> Lyusya is a diminutive of Ilya, and doesn't seem, to me, to be overly intimate.

Svetlana Nikolayevna Plisetskaya was thirteen years old when she met Ilya Yakovich Sokolovsky for the first time. She’d gotten what she was sure was her big break – she played the daughter on a nationally-syndicated television show, and Ilya played her best friend. She and Lyusya became quick friends, and from there… dating just sort of  _ happened _ .

Her parents were supportive, as they always were. They’d supported her dreams to become an actress, and they supported her relationship with Lyusya. They praised Lyusya as a good Jewish boy, and, Sveta thought, they were probably just relieved that her first boyfriend wasn’t a goy.[1]

She and Lyusya ended up having sex six months into their relationship. She didn’t regret a minute of it. Lyusya was kind and thoughtful. He was handsome, too; he had beautiful, clear blue eyes and short blonde hair. He called her his Svetlanka, his Svetushka. He told her he loved her, and she was certainly head over heels in love with him.

Then the show was cancelled. He moved away to St. Petersburg. Sveta, in her rush of teenage emotion, wanted to follow him, but it was there that her parents drew the line. There was Internet, now. They could keep in touch. But Sveta was fourteen, a child in her parents’ eyes, and they weren’t about to give up their entire livelihoods so that she could chase some boy, no matter how sure she was that Lyusya was the love of her life.

But, of course, the worst was yet to come.

Two weeks after Lyusya left, she realised that her period was late.

Two weeks after that, she went to the doctor who confirmed her suspicions: she was pregnant.

Her mother cried and asked her how she could have taken such a risk, made such a mistake. Her father assured her that there were options. This didn’t have to mean the end of her career. She could get an abortion, or, if that idea unsettled her too much, she could give the baby up for adoption.

She was adamantly against either.

Sveta decided, ultimately, to keep the baby.

Lyusya wasn’t responding to her emails or to her instant messages. He’d stopped taking her phone calls. She told herself that he was busy, but when she contacted him through every avenue available to her with the message, “Lyusya, I have something very important to tell you. Please get back to me,” he didn’t respond, either.

She decided, after that, not to tell him. If he didn’t want to be in her life anymore now that he lived in Petersburg, she wouldn’t force him.

Her child simply wouldn’t have a father.

Perhaps she was being petulant. Her parents tried to convince her that it was worth at least telling Ilya to see if he’d want to be in his child’s life, but she was adamant. And her parents didn’t have any way to contact Ilya.

Almost exactly nine months after Ilya left for St. Petersburg, Sveta gave birth to a son.

She named him Yuri, and used her father’s name for his patronymic. When the time came for his brit milah, she named him Uri ben Rivka.[2] She thought about a number of names for him, but she loved the name Uri. It meant “my light”, and she wanted her son – this little piece she had left of her Lyusya – to be a light in her life.

And, of course, she used her own Hebrew name. She wasn’t about to use Ilya’s Hebrew name; she didn’t even know if he  _ had _ a Hebrew name, if she were honest. Uri ben Rivka was more than good enough for her son.[3]

She wasn’t, if she were totally honest, completely sure what Yuri meant in Russian.[4] She knew it was the name of the first man in space, and it sounded closest to Uri without being transparently a Hebrew name.

Once she recovered enough from the birth, she started going on auditions again.

When she was sixteen, it happened for real: her big break.

It was a television series geared toward teenagers, and she would be playing the main character. It filmed in Moscow, so she didn’t have to leave home, and her mother agreed to look after Yura while she worked (and, if Sveta were honest, her parents did more work raising Yura than she did).

The show ran for four years.

When Yuri was four, he somehow got it into his head that he wanted to be a figure skater. Sveta was getting paid enough to arrange for lessons, but she was too busy working to really spend much time with him.

And the fact of the matter was, the older Yura got, the more he reminded her of Lyusya. He looked just like Lyusya, and was starting to act more and more like him, too. And that was, really, something that she couldn’t stand. She’d loved Lyusya more than anything – more than she’d ever thought it possible to love anyone – and he’d left her. Tearful goodbye aside, he hadn’t once tried to reach out to her since he’d left Moscow.

She was eighteen when she met Anton.

Anton Dmitrievich Andreev was two years older than her. He worked for a soap opera – he was one of the many recurring characters on Russia’s third most popular daytime soap. He was handsome, and charming, but Sveta knew better this time; she put up walls around him. The last thing she wanted was to end up alone again.

Anton stayed in her sphere for a year before she realised how incredibly stupid it was to avoid dating just because of one boy she’d dated as a teenager. So she agreed to go out with him.

It was the best date she’d ever been on. She went home with him – something she’d always sworn she’d never do – and she found that she didn’t regret a second of it.

Even after she arrived home to a guilt trip from her father about how Yura had missed her at whatever skating thing he’d had. Couldn’t he see that she was just trying to be a normal girl her age?

Anton, it turned out, didn’t care for children. He wasn’t repulsed by them, and he was never cruel to Yura, but it was clear immediately that the two of them didn’t click. As far as Yura was concerned, he didn’t need a father, and Anton wasn’t exactly anxious to become one for him.

She eloped with Anton when she was twenty. After she’d wrapped the series finale of her show.

They tried to live together, the three of them.

She and Yura moved into Anton’s apartment, but Yura fussed and whined for his grandfather. Her father was, for some reason, insistent upon bringing Yura to Friday night Shabbat services with him – this was fine by Sveta, who now had a built in date night with her goyishe husband. But this somehow meant, to Yura, that every other day he should whine for his grandfather.

Sveta supposed she couldn’t be too surprised – her father had, after all, all but raised the boy. She was old enough now to accept that she’d barely had any hand in raising her son.

That didn’t mean that it wasn’t frustrating.

One night, Sveta was so fed up that she packed all of Yura’s things and called her father. “I can’t take this,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I have an audition in the morning; I need to sleep.”

Her father had tutted at her, but he’d come to pick up Yura and take him back to his old room in the tiny hovel of an apartment he lived in.

Sveta got the role, but it required moving to Kiev. She knew she relied too heavily upon her parents to care for Yura as it was. But there was no way that Anton would care for Yura the whole time.

“It’s just for six months,” she’d said to her parents.

They’d tried to talk her out of it, but they’d never been very good at that. Sveta was insistent, and they eventually relented.

Six months turned into a year, and then Sveta got a job offer for a television series in Los Angeles. So she went. She stopped back in Moscow and made sure to tell Yura that she’d move them all over to LA when she made enough money to support them (after all, her parents only spoke Russian, and enough Hebrew to follow prayers – they wouldn’t be able to support themselves in America), and she left.

She had fully intended on moving Yura over with her parents.

But then before she knew it, a year turned into five, which, in turn, turned into ten.

And then Anton suggested they watch the 2018 Olympics. It was supposed to be some Russian figure skater’s last hurrah, and Russia was expected to do well. Neither of them cared much for sports, but they had some down time, and if someone was going to beat America in something, she wanted to see it.

Neither of them anticipated hearing the name “Yuri Plisetsky.”

Perhaps, she told herself at first, it was a coincidence. After all, Yuri was a common name, and Plisetsky wasn’t  _ that _ uncommon a surname.

But sure enough, there he was, looking the very image of his father.

Sveta turned off the television.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 Pretty sure this is common knowledge, but just in case: all "goy" means is someone who isn't Jewish [return to text]  
> 2 The brit milah is the ritual circumcision, and it's also when born Jewish boys get their Hebrew names.[return to text]  
> 3 Hebrew names are used to refer to the child's ties to Judaism, so if his father's Hebrew name were, for example's sake, Yitzhak, Yuri's full Hebrew name should be Uri ben Yitzhak v'Rivka. As I understand it (mostly from looking at resources for interfaith families), using just the mother's name (so "Uri ben Rivka") is totally acceptable and fine, but the assumption therein would be that his father wasn't Jewish. Judiasm doesn't put the same stigma on illegitimate children of two unmarried people as a lot of cultures. [return to text]  
> 4 Fun fact - Yuri means "George", so between Yuri and Georgi, there are two Georges at their rink. So poor Yuri is not only one of two Yu[u]ris, but he's also one of two Georges. [return to text]  
> 


End file.
